Whenever performing backup and restore operations, security is always a concern. This is particularly true whenever performing these operations over a computer network connection. Security is important because much of the data a user might want to backup may be sensitive or confidential.
Additionally, computer networks have limited bandwidth. Network service providers must pay per megabit for bandwidth utilization. Currently whenever a backup or restore operation is performed, it is performed on the entire data set and therefore requires a lot of bandwidth.
What is needed is a method to perform a backup only on the data that has changed (i.e., incrementally) since a previous backup operation in order to reduce bandwidth utilization. Additionally, such operations should be performed securely.